A new Xbox controller to make gaming accessible to more people with disabilities

Disabilities may be some sort of a starting point, but this sort of product/feature doesn't necessarily begin and end there.

A controller is a UI paradigm, like the keyboard & mouse "desktop" paradigm. Serving a userbase that can't use a standard UI will lead to invention of new ones. This could easily lead to mass market products/features that people will want regardless of disabilities.

Particularly interesting (to me) are paradigms being developed for the blind, because they can't rely on displays. This is the same sort of problem as amazon echo, driving mode phones UIs and other products that need paradigms.

The key though, the key is that blind people are a "captive" market. They can't just use the display UI every time the voice UI sucks. This gives developer the opportunity to keep improving it until the number of use cases where voice UIs work better than display gets big enough.

I can only use one hand. I use to play video games all of the time but once game controllers started requiring two hands and shoulder buttons, I couldn't play most games. I could play some games with fighting controllers (https://www.amazon.com/HORI-Fighting-Commander-Officially-Li...)

I also tried one of these - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-Playstation-handed-Dragon-cont... - but could never get the hang of it.

I might try this. My son is very into video games and I would love to play with him again. The only games that I played with him when he was younger were fighting games like Tekken and Soul Calibur and a few simple beat em up games but the games he plays now are too complicated to play with one hand.

EDIT:

I'm still trying to figure out after watching the videos, how this works with one hand. They showed a guy who had cerebral palsy that affected his right side but they never went into details about how he adapts it.

Maybe they were just expecting the target market to know about assistive technologies? I've never used any so I don't know anything about them.

There is also a personal angle to Microsoft involvement with these type of initiatives. The CEO has two children with disabilities and it looks like he is pushing for an inclusive company more than any other CEO. There is also Gobabygo which is an open source organization that modifies toy cars for children with disabilities http://sites.udel.edu/gobabygo/

This is amazing. Microsoft frequently does things that offer amazing new ways of interfacing AND are hackable enough to have flexible applications. I have fond memories of owning and "hacking" the Kinect and connecting it to my PC, to develop custom code to control media playback and stuff. I never owned one, but the Surface also looked quite unique.

However, I feel these products don't reach the level of "lovability" other such products enjoy. I wonder if this is an execution or PR problem?

Either way, hope the Adaptive Controller enables a lot of people to enjoy video games and we see some interesting unconventional applications of it soon.

All of the four controllers shown seem to be great, but it's funny that the joystick is basically just the Wii nunchuck. That's not a dig against Microsoft, I suspect Nintendo just really hit it out of the park with their Wii-mote design and that there isn't much else to improve.

I'm left-handed, and I remember realising that without thinking, I had switched to using my right hand for the analog joystick instead of the left one. This was months after I got a Wii - it was so natural that I hadn't even noticed. I don't recall anyone ever giving Nintendo credit for this, but their nunchuck-controller was pretty much the first mainstream controller for a console that was fully ambidextrous.

This is a very heart warming development for me.

My dad has one hand, and only one finger on the hand he does have. He LOVED playing Atari 2600 and NES when I was a kid and I have very fond memories of playing games with him.

After the SNES though he completely stopped playing games out of frustration, angry about why they needed so many buttons. I don’t think he ever even attempted to play our N64, let alone later consoles.

I really hope the price point is accessible, I’d love to play games with my dad again.

I recently learned two XBox controllers can function as one, an ease of access feature called Copilot.

https://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/accessories/copilot

This controller is going to be wonderful for far more than just disabled people, I can't wait to use it for more interactive possibilities.

>$99.99

That's incredible :)

It's USB, so this is going to end up being used for far more than gaming.

It's good to see people working on stuff, this type of inclusive development really makes me excited!

Storytime.

I had an online acquaintance who I practiced with in a fighting game called Blazblue. Said friend was also a martial-artist who also did live-steel fights. Dangerous, yes, but apparently there were rules about what weapons you could bring in, "first blood" and other such rules to try and keep things non-deadly.

Anyway, one of his opponents used poison as his weapon, and now his hands were permanently F'd up due to that one poison fight.

Long story short: I didn't see him online much after that. Its difficult for disabled people to get controllers that work well for them.

And its not just arbitrary fights where people can lose the fine motor control of their hands. I know people who lost fine control after a bad car accident. (Fortunately, this one was temporary and after about a year, she got most of her motor control back into her hands).

So any research into allowing injured people to better play video games (a hobby I'm very much like), is a win in my eyes. I've got at least two people who've I've personally met who would benefit. Even with today's advanced medicine, its not guaranteed that motor control will return back to your hands if you are injured.

And injuries can really happen to anybody.

When I was in junior high or highschool I made an SNES controller for my friend's mom who had limited hand movement due to a stroke. I made her a joystick from a piece of PVC pipe, two plastic spools, and a plastic case about the size of a cigar box for the base. The way the mechanism worked was I used strips of packing foam to center the PVC pipe inside the hole in the spools, and mounted 4 microswitches in a collar facing the PVC pipe. Instead of a big movement like a traditional joystick, it required only 1/8 inch "twitch" movements to close the microswitches, but was surprisingly precise & responsive considering it was made out of scraps and hot glue. (But then again I designed it to work with the limits of the materials I had access to, and "tuned" the placement of the switches as I built up the device.)

as someone with a visual impairment I am always amazed at how little we talk/learn about accessibility and its lack of inclusion in the tests of new products.

I like this "inclusive desing" term better though. (even though its the method to achieve accessibility)

Really great move by Microsoft. People often worry for things like IE support but people with disabilities often falls between the chairs.

I find it amazing that Microsoft can be doing this sort of thing, mean while, at the windows team they decided to change that windows taskbar sound control tool so that you now need to do “start->control panel->soundoptions” to change your primary source, rather than just right clicking the damn icon. One in a long range of terrible designs for windows.

How can a company simultaneously be so great and so terrible at usability?

Can we swap "disabled people" for "people with disabilities" please?